Inspired by Memoir on Father's Day with Poetry

Photo by Kate Williams

Today’s post falls on Father’s Day. Shortly after my father passed away, I received a box of his items in the mail (he had been living in Oklahoma—and I’m in Kentucky). I recall my precious time of looking through those items and wrote about it. Then, from my personal essay, I penned a poem.  

If your niche is more toward prose than poetry, here are 10 steps to turn what you’ve written into a poem.

1. Pinpoint a section in one of your stories, articles, or essays. When you read your selected section, you shouldn’t have to second-guess what it’s about. Clear and focused, we want to feel the theme (the main idea), and hear the topic (supporting sentences which directly correlate to the theme).

2. Title your poem by your theme.

3. Choose a sentence which states the topic.

4. Revise your topic sentence so it expresses a powerful idea. This will be the first line, with three to follow.

5. Find other lines from your prose which supports that idea. Revise those sentences to create three succinct statements. These will be the three lines of your poem, to follow the line from #4.

6. You should now have four lines. Skip a line. Develop another key sentence as pulled from your prose. This sentence will start the second stanza and is the first of four lines. (In poetry rules, a stanza is a division of four or more lines.)

7. Add three more lines, same as you did in #5.

8. Repeat and add stanzas until the theme (or main idea) is brought full circle, to a closure. (No rules on how many stanzas there should be.)

9. Tinker with, and revise as needed, so that each stanza emits strong emotion, insight, or analysis. Depending on if you are working from a story, an article, or an essay, may determine if your goal is to describe, inform, or persuade.   

10. Optionally, you may revise words to elicit rhyming. However, a poem can be a poem without rhyming. Veracity expressed by your idea makes a poem.

Photo by Benjamin Balάzs

Perhaps you have a special someone in mind, to share your thoughts with, in the way of poetry. For me, here is the poem I wrote about my father:

He Is, He Is

A man I never knew, void from my memory flashes,

When a woman called me to ask, “Do you want me to send you his ashes?”

He was cast out of my life,

Because I was taken by my mother, his wife,

She, who called me, tells me we lived mountains aside,

And that he loved me dearly with no want to hide,

I wish I could have known him, if only he had known me,

Because with his passing life, all that is left is his ashes to be forever free,

My address, I tell her,

When a week later I get his personal effects, which sets my heart astir,

I gaze upon his trinkets, tie-tacks, and medallions,

Because I feel him when I touch the symbolic blue stones, golden amulets, and Texan stallions,

To steal away his bronze coin for me to find, in my pocket daily,

I wondered if he’d mind, for me to feel his love bravely,

He allows me, I believe, into his inner self as an open clue,

Because only now is his wisdom deep in me as I come to love the man I never knew,

Now that his life is over, the stars will be grateful to have his ashy dust,

Because only then can a shooting star release another soul, as my father’s soul is forever put to rest,

He is, he is.

-Elle-